Chapter 5 Dangerous Places

September 23

I rose at five a.m. It would be a long day to make it over the pass. As I packed my sleeping bag I saw mouse hare paw prints close by. They had waited for me to fall asleep and then crept to within inches of my head and taken the few scraps of rice I had intentionally left by my pack.

The sun was still behind the horizon, the temperature well below zero. I was anxious to move, to warm up, but as I started to walk activity in the rockfall to the left caught my attention. I imagined it to be the mouse family and went to investigate. I peeked behind a chest-high, loose stone wall a hundred metres from where I had camped and there found a dozen men huddled and shivering around an infant dung fire. All of them were cloaked in rough wool blankets and smelled of hard work and woodsmoke. They were dark and mustachioed; all of them had towels wrapped turban-like around their heads. The group turned and stared with bleary eyes.

Lahaul, Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India

One man stood up, shook my hand and offered a jolly invitation for breakfast tea. I declined his offer as I was anxious to get moving. Then the man confirmed what I had guessed from their thin clothes, sockless feet and dark complexions. They were Nepali road workers who had finished their annual contract and were heading for the trailhead at Darcha to start the long journey back to their country. I went around the circle and shook each man’s hand as he offered it. We bid our farewells, saying that maybe we would all share chai at Darcha.

I felt sorry for those men. They were part of the immense, transitory Nepali workforce in India. Over one million labourers find work south of the border, taking jobs that even the lowest caste Indians decline: hazardous factory work, back-breaking road construction, kitchen labouring, street sweeping and toilet cleaning. That they leave home to find such menial labour is a comment on the destitute state of their own nation. The economic refugees I’d seen shivering by the fire that morning had all smiled but they looked used and hollow. They had been beaten down by months of second-class citizenship.With their wheezing breath and frozen plastic shoes I wondered how they would ever make it over a 5,000-metre pass.

Snow cover started not long after the climb began. The surface was hard and I moved quickly. At just over 5,000 metres the Shingo-la is snow covered all year round. I walked upwards through a world of white as incandescent snow slipped into a bleached sky. A spectral fog hung close to the ice. Pale mist floated on the slopes around me.

Pushing upwards felt good, every stride solid. I focused on the steps. My body, which over the months had rebuilt itself, had adapted well to its new environment. I had a stronger, harder body. To walk hard at that altitude, to feel my muscles and mind moving smoothly, sliding together as well-oiled elements, was meditative, something simultaneously physically challenging and mentally relaxing.

But four hours into the walk the smell of death broke my contemplation. The thick, festering odour grew stronger. I smelled it for ten minutes before I saw it, half-buried in the snow, half-devoured by crows, the molding carcass of a horse. Shredded skin hung from its architecture of bones. The animal stared at me from behind hollow eyes. Its mouth was stretched wide, a full set of teeth smiled from a lipless maw. It was the first of four horse corpses I saw that day. The skeletons were a morbid reminder of how, in the violent storms of two weeks before, a pair of local men had lost their lives on the Shingo-la.

When I heard the news I had had difficulty believing it. I had seen Zanskaris sleep outside at minus-thirty degrees Celsius covered only by a tattered blanket. It was inconceivable that two of these examples of local adaptation should perish in a freak late summer storm, while the middle-aged French couple they were guiding had survived. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized those men were victims of their own forgetfulness. In tennis shoes, cotton clothes and with the attitude of being on a fair weather stroll, the pair had been overconfident and ill-prepared. The two pony men had walked the Shingo-la dozens of times and, in this case, familiarity breeds not contempt but complacency.

In the blizzard, which developed with brutal speed, the older guide had become confused and separated from the group. The number-two man, a teenager, had then lost his nerve and walked into the storm without explaining to his clients what his plan was. He never returned. The two tourists, who had come equipped for whatever the Himalayas might unleash, struggled down to Kargyud. There the story was pieced together and search parties were dispatched, to no avail. The bodies were never recovered. Two men were dead because they had forgotten what Zanskaris have understood for millenniums – respect for the mountains that dominate their lives.

For the Buddha Shakyamuni, it was a vision of death that brought him to renounce his coddled princehood in the ancient Nepali city of Kapilvastu and strike out in pursuit of a way of life beyond death. The Buddha, then known as Prince Siddhartha Gautama, led an extremely protected life and it was not until he was twenty-nine years old that he left his palace for the first time. Outside, over a series of three trips, he met an old man, a diseased man and a decaying corpse. The prince was shocked by these visions and became distraught when Channa, his charioteer, explained that everyone must die. On another trip outside the palace he met a Hindu ascetic and after discussing religion with him decided to join the order of monks and find a way to overcome old age, illness and death.

Eventually, through much experimentation, he discovered his way to a state of higher consciousness by forging what became known as the Middle Way, a path between the extreme depravations of the ascetics and his own previously indulgent princely lifestyle. Gareth’s death had given me the jolt to begin my own exploration. I don’t expect to defy death, but I have a wish to explore the way. I have no doubt that this will be an investigation of many lifetimes; I am no Buddha.

At the col I stopped to tie a prayer flag I had bought in Padum to the summit stupa. I gave thanks for my safe arrival and remembered the two lost souls. I turned south, out of the Shingo-la’s shimmering whiteness, in search of the southern valley’s greenery. After the hard slog of the climb I felt as if I was flying on the downhill. The creak of my boots was music to my ears. I felt the rush of air in and out of my lungs; it was weightless, and with the pull of gravity, so was I. In the moments between steps I felt the magical synchronicity of my body’s parts. Strangely, the thrill was heightened by the thought of the two men on the Shingo-la because in the wilderness of the pass I had glimpsed death’s inevitability. Impermanence is reality. Death was there, not as the Grim Reaper, but as a catalyst.

Far down the pass I reached a narrow, thin-grassed pasture and with a cloudless sky didn’t bother to pitch my tent. I lay down in my sleeping bag. A cream-coloured butterfly landed on the hazy blue nylon shell, its wings pulsing slower than the fall of the sun. I lay back. Darkness was overtaking light. I stared at the Milky Way, its stars thick as fog. I breathed, expecting the air to be sprinkled with diamond dust. Sleep is a small death – dreams a new life.

September 24

I woke to find my sleeping bag surrounded by bleating goats. They stared at me, golden slit eyes inquisitive, nuzzling their snouts into my nylon cocoon, assuming the best grass lay beneath my mattress. They were a curious gang that took great pleasure in huddling around as I prepared my tsampa porridge breakfast.

The trail started steeply downhill but by early afternoon the path had levelled and transformed to a gravel road that followed the Barai Nala (nala in Hindi means stream). As it descended the land became more populated. I had crossed a border and was now in Lahaul district of Himachal Pradesh State. Mud-brick mansions were replaced by concrete block bungalows. Electric wires, the umbilical cords of modernization, connected the villages. A four-wheel-drive, battered and spewing black exhaust, lurched along the track. Near the village of Palamao I saw a schoolyard filled with students loudly repeating Hindi lessons. A hiss like a deflating tire spread through the group as they recognized a foreigner was close by and the entire class turned their backs on the teacher and rushed to the edge of the compound, shouting at me in grammarless English, “You, Now, Go, How, Out, Goodbye, Top notch, Brother, Man.”

Ten kilometres farther on I reached Darcha, the trailhead village at the confluence of the Bhaga River and the Barai Nala. It was not what I had expected. From the path above the village I saw a line of temporary cafés roofed with army surplus parachutes. A kilometre-long traffic jam of stationary buses, trucks and jeeps snaked around a ridge to the north. Along the double-laned gravel road hundreds of people milled around, talking, smoking, playing cards on the ground and drinking chai. Over rice and dal in one of the cafés a pair of stranded truck drivers, Pradip and Sunny, told me, in English, how the rains had destroyed roads throughout the Himalaya.

“Bloody, fucking crazy, man,” said Sunny. “One day we are making our way from Chandigarh to Leh and the next we’re almost washed into the bloody river.”

Both men were from the same village in Uttar Pradesh state. Pradip, the older one, had worked as a driver’s helper for eight years from the age of ten before he got a chance to drive a truck and when he finally secured a driver’s position he had brought Sunny, a relative, on to learn the trade. Both men’s hands were permanently etched with spidery black lines of grease. Both of them chain-smoked. They were excited to tell their story.

They had been transporting rice for the army, from Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab state, to Leh. They had been driving a day and a half when the storm first hit and they had camped that night twenty kilometres south of Darcha when rain and darkness combined to make it impossible for them see what was on the road ahead. They laid out their sleeping bags on the bench seats in the cab of the truck and hoped the storm would break by morning.

But they were woken abruptly around three o’clock. The rear of the truck was moving sideways. Sunny threw off his sleeping bag and scrambled outside. The hillside was flowing with water – “like a waterfall, man” – eating away at the road. What had been solid ground was turning to quicksand. Behind him he could see a truck they had travelled with over the Rohtang-la was already halfway off the road. He ran back and pleaded with the drivers to abandon the truck and join them but they wouldn’t come.

Back in their truck Pradip had fired up the diesel and driven a few hundred metres to higher ground. Sunny jumped in and they drove an hour or so along the disintegrating road until they were stopped in Darcha by the police. As Sunny said, “It was just like a movie, man. Pradip the driving hero and me his right-hand man.” Pradip was more pragmatic: “The roads ahead and behind us are washed away. How long are we going to be stuck here? No driving, no pay.”

After lunch they invited me to join them for some whiskey back at their truck. I politely declined, knowing that Indian truck drivers have a reputation for drinking hard and long and I wanted to find a decent campsite for the night.

The route I wanted to follow, down the Bhaga River and over the Rohtang-la to Manali, had been badly damaged. Moreover, the Leh-Srinagar road, the main route into Ladakh from the railhead at Jammu farther to the west, had been closed for even longer and much of the traffic that would normally use that road had opted to try to reach Leh using the Manali route. Hundreds of drivers had no choice but to wait. The army engineers in charge of reconstruction didn’t expect the road to be open for two weeks.

It was boom-time for the food tents in Darcha. I doubted the restaurants had enough supplies to keep such a crowd fed for a fortnight and was glad I was not a hotel owner trying to obtain payment from irate truckers.

In one respect the ruined road was a blessing. Walking with no traffic, I could enjoy the scenery and hear the river without the background din of head-splitting air horns.

I found a nice campsite that night, a small, close-cropped pasture surrounded by golden-leafed poplars within sight of the Bhaga River.

September 25

My first stop on the quiet road to Manali was Jispa, a tiny, four-house village best known as the site where the Dalai Lama performed a Kalachakra initiation in 1994. The Kalachakra, or Wheel of Time ritual, is the most public of the Tibetan tantric ceremonies. The Dalai Lama has performed the initiation around the world, from hundred-thousand-seat sports stadiums in Europe to monastery courtyards in the Himalayas.

Tantric practices are part of the Tibetan Buddhist or Vajrayana (diamond) path. The Kalachakra Tantra deals with time and revolving cycles, from the birth and death of universes to the cycle of human breath in and out of the body, and through those connections attempts to relate the individual with the universal.

The ceremony in Jispa had attracted 30,000 people from all over India, Nepal and Tibet. According to the anthropologist Kim Gutschow, who had travelled over the Shingo-la with the nuns of Karsha for the ceremony, it had been a “Himalayan Woodstock.” A tent city had been set up around the grounds, and nomads from the western plains of Tibet, the Changtang, rubbed shoulders with New Delhi businessmen, reclusive Buddhist meditators came down from their cave retreats and aspiring local politicians preached to the assembled crowds about how good the district would be if they were elected. It was a beehive of activity as monks, nuns, lay practitioners, healers, shamans, oracles, even weather makers, all assembled to partake in Buddhism’s biggest spectacle. (The Dalai Lama was known to travel to large outdoor initiations with a man who could change the weather through his meditation, thus always ensuring a sunny day for the event.)

When I passed through Jispa, however, all that remained of the event was a beautiful temple and a wide gravel field. The temple was a two-storey concrete structure. Interestingly, the concrete had been formed to imitate the traditional Tibetan mud-brick and wood temple construction style. The technique could have looked cheap and overdone, but the building had been painted with the same precision that Lama Stanzin applied to his murals in Lingshed and the effect was of a newer building that would age well.

The field in front of the temple was broad and long. It stretched for a few hundred metres from the river to the road, but it was a skeleton ground, grey and bony; it needed people to make it attractive. The field was adorned with only four wind-whitened poles, delimbed poplar trees, and from them, yellow, green, red, white and blue prayer flags snapped in the breeze.

The woodblock printed flags feature Tibetan prayers and images of tigers, dragons, snow lions and the mythical reptilian bird Garuda. In the centre of each piece of cloth was a picture of the wind horse from which the flags draw their Tibetan name, Lung-ti. It is believed that when the wind catches the prayers they ride off as horses on the wind. The flags’ colours represent the five elements: green – earth, yellow – wind, red – fire, blue – water, and white – air. The wind horses carry the blessings through the elements to where they are needed most.

A massive change in wind, a freak, unpredictable surge of air off the Pacific Ocean, is what created the colossal waves on Elk Lake that led to Gareth’s death. Thinking about wind as something positive, something that delivers goodness, helps me comprehend the loss. Transforming something with terrible power into an obliging entity is a comfort.

On the initiation ground a single monk wandered in the distance. He waved at me, seemingly unconcerned with a visitor. His robes billowed around him in the breeze and he continued on to the river.

From Jispa I moved towards Keylong, the district capital of Lahaul. For the first time in weeks I passed thick groves of trees, small man-made forests of poplar. The golden woods rustled nervously, and their fall colours of saffron, rust and cherry red were shocking against the sandy barrenness of the hills. I stopped by the river. A hoopoe bird, red with black and white stripes, bobbed past, its eyes to the ground, searching for autumn seed. I sat for an hour in the shade of the poplars going through the ritual of making tea – collecting water, boiling it on my chugging stove, dipping the tea bag until the perfect colour was achieved, adding milk powder, sugar, cardamom pods, ground cinnamon and dried ginger, simmering it again and then leaning back, sipping the sweetness of India and listening to the leaves’ whisper. The bubbling brew, the rumble of the stove, the thump and wallop of the river, the tickle of the leaves were a chaos of gentle sound that only added to my quietude.

I reached Keylong as darkness overtook the valley. The town is near the junction of the Bhaga and Chandra rivers. Buildings stretch up the hillsides in an unordered mix. Along the streets hundreds of young trees planted to stabilize the hillside created a boulevard effect. Keylong was the first major Himalayan town since Leh that had the potential to be beautiful in the midst of the mountains.

I stayed the night in a guest house. When I spread my sleeping bag out that night it was dark, and after a long day’s walk I had only one desire – sleep. The next morning, I discovered a fantastic view over the fields of Khardong village and the mountains south of the Bhaga River.

September 26

The next morning a throbbing pain in my lower right jaw woke me. My mouth felt as if it was crawling with stinging insects. I spat, expecting blood, but produced only milky saliva. A week before I had broken a lower molar in Zanskar, fittingly by biting into a frozen chocolate bar. Now I was worried the stumpy remains were getting infected. The inevitable trip to the dentist could be postponed no longer.

Visiting the dentist in India is an unappealing prospect. In every major town on the subcontinent, you find men who hang big-toothed signboards marked Dentist outside their hole-in-the-wall shops. I have talked to Indian “dentists” who claim they can perform everything from extractions and fillings to root canals and jaw reconstructions. One practitioner I came across in a Delhi backstreet had arranged his patients’ extracted teeth, like a row of tiny ivory trophies, on a shelf facing his current client. With that in mind, I decided to catch a bus from the north side of Rohtang-la to Manali and then another overnight ride to Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. There I knew a proficient dentist associated with the Tibetan government’s Delek hospital. After the dental work I would return to Manali and continue the trek.

Koksar, at the northern base of Rohtang-la, is a fifty-kilometre walk from Keylong. I started the day with sorry expectations but within a few kilometres the ache hissing in my jaw dissipated. Villages passed by with the people shouting questions from balconies and fields: “Where are you going, friend?” “Why don’t you stop and have a tea?” Friendly shopkeepers and the gentle roar of the chai-wallahs’ stoves are what I remember of that stretch of road.

Five kilometres past Keylong the Bhaga River joins the Chandra. The valley broadens and the vegetation becomes greener. Although I was technically still on the arid, monsoonfree north side of the Himalayas, the extreme dryness in the air that characterizes Ladakh and Zanskar was being replaced by a more temperate subcontinental Indian humidity.

I was fortunate to have lunch in a café whose owner was a veritable mine of local information. Lobsang Dawa was a short, chubby man with a big smile and broad hands. For twentyfive years he had worked as an inspector of roads for the government and had seen his valley move from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in the two dozen years he had been employed.

“When I started we had no motorable roads here. Now we have trucks moving day and night,” he told me.

The speed of development, he admitted, had created problems regarding economic expectations and challenges to traditional culture, but he pointed out there had been difficulties with the old ways too – shorter life spans, lack of schooling, scarcity of government services. The balance between the old and new is what he said was important. He didn’t want his grandchildren to not understand what it is to be Lahauli. “You’ve got to have a sense of who you are,” he said, holding his grandson on his lap. Sometimes, he admitted, he wished for the old days because he thought they were simpler times, but as he said, “I quickly get over that, because in the old days, at my age, I’d be dead.”

Koksar, on the bare northern slope of the Rohtang-la, was a motley collection of roadside cafés and stranded vehicles. From the cafés, a few hundred metres away on the north bank of the Chandra River I could see a few houses but in Koksar there were no actual homes; it existed only to service truck drivers and waylaid travellers. The cafés smelled of whiskey and piss. Their concrete block walls were stained with betel nut juice and dog shit. Inside one of the buildings I could hear drivers hooting and hollering at a television game show broadcast from Delhi.

There was nothing there to encourage me to stay, but whole sections of the road up the pass had been washed out in the recent storm and there were only unscheduled buses now crossing the pass. I was too late to catch a bus or truck that day and had no desire to overnight in the midst of a crowd of drunken truck drivers. So I tramped another fifteen minutes downriver and on a patch of grass that overlooked bands of bright poplars on the river’s far bank I pitched my tent.

Brown accentors and grey wagtails hopped around my stove as I made dinner. Two magpies cackled and stared at me from boulders in the distance. A wild rose bush, long gone from bloom, twitched in the breeze off to one side of my tent. The wind that channelled down the valley kept up through the night. It caught the loose edges of my flysheet and slapped a constant reminder of its presence.

September 27

The next morning back at Koksar I joined the mass of impatient travellers. Rumour had it that a bus bound for Manali would arrive sometime in the morning. It was starting from Keylong but would proceed only as far as the first rock slide up the pass. There we would have to walk over mud and rocks to meet another bus, which would deliver us to the next break in the road. Again we would walk; again we would be met by another bus. The process would be repeated four times over the Rohtang to the village of Nehru Kund at the western base of the pass. From there the last five kilometres of road into Manali had literally disappeared in a flash flood of the Beas River and our journey would be completed on foot.

The crowd was abuzz with a new word, “shuttling.” To my companions “shuttling,” running from one decrepit bus to another, seemed like a grand adventure.

Around eleven a.m. we spotted the bus a kilometre away. It was silver and blue and from that distance bore an uncanny resemblance to a biscuit box on wheels. A buzz ran through the crowd. It swayed towards us and pulled to a halt, the interior already bursting with passengers. The mob on the road stormed the vehicle, and inertia pulled me with them. I was catapulted upwards and found myself competing for roof space with two dozen Nepali labourers. Things calmed as the seating politics settled. However, I was a poor politician. There was no room on the luggage rack for me and I was squeezed to the edge of the aluminum roof. I held onto the frame’s steel bars while my feet dangled over the side panels.

The engine roared to life. The conductor made his rounds swinging a bamboo cane. Unfortunate souls hanging from the open windows were beaten to the ground.

The coach laboured out of the village. With that kind of a load it would be a small miracle if we made it to the first slide. However, I’ve learned the Indian bus is an ugly, hardy breed. It wasn’t fast or elegant, but moved sluggishly and with a great conviction over a surface that had ceased to be a road.

From the rooftop, fantastic panoramas evolved. My feet outlined 300-metre abysses as the bus crawled along inches from their edge. To avoid vertigo I frequently glanced over my shoulder at the passengers stretched out beside me. The Nepalis were grouped in huddles, chatting, smoking and playing cards in the wind. My most interesting companion, however, was a Tibetan lama seated at the peak of the roof’s mound of baggage.

He was old, and though I find it impossible to accurately estimate the age of Buddhist monks, he looked to be well into his seventies. His grey-white hair was tied in a bun, samurai style, his face veiled in a beard that fell from his chin in a wispy spike. Since most Buddhist monks I had met wore the close-cropped hair of the Geluk-pa school, I reckoned that his beard must make him a member of the older Nyingmapa order. He wore burgundy robes and had a thick wool blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He sat cross-legged, facing into the wind, while his fingers gripped the jute rope holding down the hillock of trunks and suitcases. Occasionally, he would turn and smile but generally appeared lost in contemplation.

At the first slide shouts and clapping erupted. The adventure had begun – we were about to shuttle. I decided to help the lama with his gear, an assortment of rice sacks and tarpaulin bags, more possessions than I thought a monk would need. We scurried through the rocks, loaded down like mules, and on the far side regained our rooftop space. The cycle continued: the slow rumble over disintegrated roads, the feverish dash across the slide and the sailboat sway of the new vehicle’s movement.

Three-quarters of the way up the pass we entered a band of clouds and a cold damp began to work under my clothes. With the temperature barely above zero I was debating whether my infected tooth was worth the trip. My hands felt to be locked in a cadaverous grip on the railings. The road workers seemed impervious, their composure unchanged. Huddled tight together, their backs to the wind, they shared cigarettes and spoke quietly. On his hill of baggage the lama was savouring the weather’s change, as moisture clung to his face and his beard splayed back on both sides of his neck. I swear the man was smiling.

The wheezing tin bus arrived at the summit and without so much as a second breath careened down the western slope at speeds that made me nervous. With the increased wind chill I shivered uncontrollably, my hands frozen to the rack. Again my roof-mates let the weather pass them by; the speed seemed to do nothing more than ruffle their hair. They had lived in worse conditions while building roads such as this one and nothing could now destroy the fact they were going home.

After what seemed like a lifetime of hairpin turns we came to a line of ramshackle cafés, known as dhabas in India, just above the treeline. They were temporary, corrugated tin huts in the avalanche shadow of a line of two-storey, house-size boulders.

Some form of primary rigor mortis had set into my joints. It took me a minute of pure concentration to unclench my fists. I staggered from the roof and through numb lips ordered hot coffee at the closest table. I guess because I had helped him with his luggage I was joined by the monk and we shared a silent meal of greasy omelets and stale bread.

By the time we rejoined our bus the clouds had risen and the drizzly rain had petered out. It felt as if the worst was over. Around me the Nepalis started to sing, faint, tuneless Hindi pop songs. Another two hours, I thought, and I would be in a hotel room in Manali, immersed under a hot shower for the first time since Leh.

We reached the treeline. It was the first time I had been below the Himalayas’ 3,200-metre treeline since the start of the trek. There the pavement was in better shape. With the greenery the view disappeared but I was glad not to see the road switchbacking beneath my feet. However, in the forest’s shade the temperature dropped and the road became iced over. Just as I was starting to recall some of the advantages of mechanized transport, the driver lost control. The old bus careened off the ashphalt, lurched drunkenly down the bank and slammed square into a towering deodar cedar.

The crash threw me cleanly off the roof. I landed spread-eagled on the mossy forest floor with my back to the vehicle. I turned reflexively. The bus, with its eighty passengers staring out the windows, was tipping up onto two wheels. I was directly beneath it. In that split-second animal instincts overran me. Muscles I’d never encountered contracted and in one clean, physically impossible movement I leaped two metres from my prostrate position and out of the danger zone.

Throughout the dive my eyes were fixed on the bus, as it rose, reached a point of equilibrium, hung on that axis and then, just as gracefully, dropped back onto four wheels. It was vehicular ballet. For a split-second, the inanimate object had been bestowed with an elegance reserved for animals.

The quietude of the moment broke instantly. With four wheels back on the ground a communal howl rose from the passengers, windows popped from the fuselage and a human cascade rolled down the flanks of the bus.

I stood, shaking uncontrollably. I leaned over, reached for the ground and felt solid earth. I sat down and looked up. The lama, still on his hill of baggage, still gripping the jute ropes, was laughing.

Eventually, I retrieved my pack. I didn’t wait for another bus; I thought it better to walk the last kilometres to Manali.

Three days later in Dharamsala a gentle-fingered British dentist did what she could for my rotting tooth. “That must hurt,” she commented, seeing the broken molar. “Not much,” I replied. She touched it with a steel instrument and I jerked uncontrollably from the chair.

I had been able to contact some old friends. For the first time in months I had a real conversation in English. It had been a relaxing time, but it was October. Soon the first snows would come to the high passes, so I booked a seat on the night bus for Manali.

October 3

The bus from Dharamsala back to Manali left at eleven p.m. It was almost empty and after the mishap on the Rohtang-la I was glad to be inside the vehicle. The driver continued at a leisurely pace, stopping at every village. The ambling ride put me at ease. At 3:30 a.m. we pulled up at a chai stall in the middle of nowhere. Its two incandescent light bulbs were the only illumination I had seen for kilometres. On a string bed outside the building the driver fell asleep. The passengers were left to fend for themselves.

I ordered tea and began talking to the passenger who had silently appeared by my side. He was a short, compactly built man with a rounding of his words that made you think he was comfortable with an audience. Prakash Anoop was the public prosecutor from Mandi, the district just south of Manali. I enjoyed talking to him. He spoke perfect English and projected competence. He was an autodidact who surprised me with what he knew: “Oh, you are from Vancouver Island. Beautiful place, I have heard, with mountains and beaches and flowers while the rest of Canada is under snow.” He believed a broad knowledge base was important for his law practice.

We ordered more chai, sweet and thick in sticky glasses. My friend made a conversational leap and began to address the emergence of the “New India,” the India being driven by the country’s recent economic boom. It was four a.m. and I was tired, but the barrister was just starting to hit his stride. He did not get many chances to talk to foreigners and wanted an external opinion on the changes in his country.

“Just look at advertising,” he said, raising his hands. “Companies telling everyone, not just the people with money, that they need newer things, they need more things.

“… Twenty years ago my education was enough to gain respect. Now I am a lawyer without a car or a laptop computer, so people think I am a failure.” Prakash was not happy with this New India.

His diatribe continued. He was a good man caught in the rush of transition. The New India, according to him, was rolling headlong into a world of superficiality. It was five o’clock and even the constant flow of chai could not keep my eyes open. He asked my opinion but all I could offer was that Indians needed to manage the change themselves. It was a nothing statement and he knew it. His mouth dropped; he had wanted more from someone who lived in a place that represented the potential future of his country. He wanted to say something but didn’t. He looked sad and our conversation petered out.

The driver woke with a start not long after and immediately stumbled without a word back to the bus. The engine roared to life and with that, the alarm we were waiting for, the group shuffled back to our seats.

I stayed that night in a nondescript concrete hotel in Manali. It would be my last night with a shower and the potential for a nice meal so I took advantage. I showered before and after dinner and treated myself to a meal at the best South Indian restaurant in town. But I was anxious to get back on the trail. I was restless in bed that night, like a child on the night before Christmas.

October 4

From Manali I walked south five kilometres on the main road along the Beas River, then where the small Alaini River meets the Beas I turned northeast and followed the creek up past Prini village towards the Hamta-la.

By late morning the houses of Prini had disappeared below me. The trail wound through steep paddies divided by stone walls. With the increase in altitude the view grew more spectacular. To the west Manali looked like a Matchbox toy set placed in the forest. Far up the valley I saw the grey and white face of the Rai Ghar glacier, source of the Beas River. I followed the path of the river downwards and along its course could see the open sores of the flood’s recent destruction. Against the swathe of the river’s ruinous path, the main road and the tiny cars moving along it looked trivial.

I stopped outside a lone house far above the village. Below it was a jigsaw puzzle of geometrical paddies, and not far above it the forest began. Drenched in sweat and breathing heavily I unslung my pack and sat on a rock. I took a bandana from my pocket, wiped my forehead and from over the balcony of the house came a voice asking if I’d like a glass of water. I looked up to see a beautiful, raven-haired woman leaning over the banister. She looked South Asian but spoke English with a London accent.

I nodded – there must have been an amusing look of shock on my face – then left my pack on the balcony and followed her inside. In the sun-stroked, pine-panelled living room she sat on a low stool, cross-legged, facing the valley. She turned and smiled, her focus caught between me and the fresh leaves she was pulling from an aluminum basin on the floor. Her skin was a transparent olive tone, her almond eyes framed by long lashes. In the split second before we submitted to the conventions of etiquette I saw her twin in my mind’s eye, a miniature painting I had recently seen in the Indian National Museum, a pen and watercolour portrait of Radha, the consort of the Hindu god Krishna.

I dropped onto a worn stool by the window. She handed me a stainless steel tumbler of water and, after placing the bunch of leaves she was holding back into the bowl, she held out her hand and introduced herself as Sheraz Khan. She was an Anglo-Pakistani on her annual “retreat” in the Himalayas. She rented the house for four months a year and used it to read and relax. The cabin was simple, with a single wooden room, a narrow bed against one wall, two wash basins, a chair, a few stools and an unvarnished pine table scattered with cooking equipment.

I was surprised Sheraz was alone and asked if she felt safe five kilometres from the nearest village. She gave me a scorching look. “Well, it seems you’re on your own!”

I finished the water and realized the leaves, which I now saw strewn everywhere, were marijuana, Cannabis indica. I recognized the thick resinous scent hanging over everything. She saw my roaming eyes and said simply, “It’s harvest time.”

Sheraz was rubbing the leaves between her hands, extracting the resin to make hashish. When I asked if she was doing it for sale or personal use, she grinned, “Personal consumption. If I’m going to smoke, I’m going to make sure the stuff is good.”

It seemed like a lot of plants for a single woman.

The presence of the hash made me nervous. Manali is the drug capital of India. Marijuana grows wild in the Himalayas, but in recent years it has become a highly lucrative, illegal cash crop. Gone are the indigenous, feral weeds talked of and smoked by overlanding hippies in the ’60s. Now genetic technology developed in Holland and industrial herbicides insure the quality of the mind-altering tetrahydrocannabinol in the plants.

Police estimate that over 20,000 hectares in the Kulu Valley are planted with marijuana. The huge amount of money involved has attracted organized crime; Israeli, German, Irish, British and Italian gangs compete with the Indian mafia. The turf wars have become violent. Since 1992 fifteen foreigners have officially gone missing in the valley, but unofficial estimates by the nongovernmental organization Fair Trials Abroad put that number at fifty internationals. Few bodies have been found and the bulk of these disappearances are attributed to gang infighting and unpaid drug debts.

Sheraz gave me some plants, showed me how to remove the superfluous parts and gently roll the leaves between my palms until a heavy paste dislodged. With her melodic instructions my apprehension disappeared. The grey, molasses-like substance grew blacker as the layer on my hands became thicker until eventually it could be rolled into a ball. The technique was simple and measured. Maybe it was the resin in the air, maybe the rhythm of the repetition, but I found the process immensely soothing.

For a few hours we sat making the substance Hindus call charas. Charas is closely associated with Lord Shiva, the creator-destroyer of the Hindu pantheon. Many of his followers, Shaivite saddhus, smoke hashish, using its hallucinatory qualities to connect themselves with the god. Smoking for them is a complex set of offerings that transforms the consumption into a religious practice.

Once during the great Shivaratri festival in Kathmandu, the largest annual celebration of Shiva in Nepal, I smoked with the saddhus. The ritual started with the preparation of the hash and tobacco mixture. First they muttered mantras beneath their breath and used their left thumbs to massage the mix held tightly in their right palms. Then, in time with another set of mantras, they stuffed the sticky shreds into their vertically held, clay chillum pipes. Using steel tongs they took embers from the nearest fire. In a religion obsessed with purity, fire and water are the elements of ultimate cleanliness. Then, holding the ember tight to the pipe’s bowl and with mighty puffs, they worked the hash into a pulsing red orb. With the smoke rising the ascetics exhaled, held their pipes to the heavens and into the cloud offered Lord Shiva the first taste of the charas, shouting, “Bom, Shiva.”

Sheraz invited me for lunch. We had a simple meal of rice and lentils on her balcony. The view stretched up and down the Beas Valley, from the glaciers to the jungle. The paddies, which started a hundred metres below the house, were green with a late season crop of rice and other more secretive crops. The fields stepped down three hundred metres almost to the river. The air was crisp and I could smell sandalwood soap on Sheraz’s skin. The thought of staying flashed in my head. But companionship was not why I had started the walk, and besides, the goddess had not requested my presence. When I left, we shook hands and then on second thoughts gave each other small kisses, cheek to cheek, in the French way.

Where the fields ended the forest began. For a North American that seems logical, but in South Asia where overpopulation has created intense pressure for wood, such a transition is rare. Virgin forest is scarce, but on the Hamta-la I found myself for the first time since Pakistan in woods thick enough to block the view to the valley. For a forest-dweller such as myself it was a small homecoming. I was at ease surrounded by deodar cedars and chir pines. Above me I watched the curves of their limbs undulate in the breeze while my feet tripped over labyrinthine roots. Their sharp scent was everywhere. The forest floor was mossy, and in the hummocks and depressions the season’s last flowers, scullteria and swertia, held to their colours of violet, pink and eggshell white.

I stopped well before sunset, not wanting to leave the intimacy of the forest. I built a fire, a wood-fed blaze of crackling sticks, furious and clean after the dozens of smoldering yak dung fires I had nurtured above the treeline. It was a fire to lie beside and dream.

When Gareth was seventeen and eighteen he spent two summers working with me in the forests of northern British Columbia. We, along with thousands of other young people across the country, were replanting areas that had recently been logged. Treeplanting was good, hard work, the kind of job that brought out the best in people. In the tent camps we lived in, sometimes a hundred kilometres from the nearest town, almost every night someone would light a campfire and tired people would emerge from the darkness seeking company. The golden circle around the fire was a place to relax, to have a few beers and talk bullshit before you wandered off, exhausted, to bed. The campfire was a space between night and day, a place removed from work, somewhere for relationships to blossom and rivalries to be brought into the open. There, from the edge of darkness, I could observe the people I supervised.

Gareth, I was happy to see, was the kind of person who fit in easily, a gentle, easygoing guy. A young man you could rely on. Deep down, he was shy, the baby of the family. Around camp he didn’t readily accept the approaches of the girls who were interested in him. He had been sheltered by older brothers and a sister. He needed re-inforcement, the kind of thing I should have given, but I was too busy with my own life. Now I see it as selfishness, too absorbed in myself, too concerned with what others would think. At the time I thought I was making Gareth tougher, stronger, bringing him to find his own way. In retrospect I regret not shouldering into him, letting him know I was there and that we were brothers, together, in the bush.

The flames leaped and crackled, oily cedar boughs popped and fizzed, pine needles snapped in contained blue bursts of gas. The moss beneath me was as thick and soft as a mattress.

October 5

I passed through the conifers, beyond a stratum of rhododendron, birch and matted juniper, and back into the alpine. Flocks of sheep grazed in the parched meadows. The shepherds were on their way home from the pastures along the Tibetan border to Kulu and farther east another fifty kilometers to the Brahmour Valley. In undyed Nehru jackets and woolen pillbox hats and the loose, sunbeaten complexions of those who live outdoors, they had a frayed, comfortable look. Two things about them were constant. Lit or unlit, a bedi – the small Indian cheroot – always hung from their mouths. Their other steadfast appendage was their dogs, broad-faced, muscular black-brown beasts. They were intelligent animals that sat unaffected until their masters gave a command, prefaced by the dog’s name, which brought them leaping into action, rounding up lambs and keeping track of bears and wolves. The intensity of their gaze was disconcerting.

One group invited me to dinner. They had no shelter beyond their blankets, so we sat in the open. A fresh wind blew from the pass. Over the fire they cooked rice and fleshy shanks of mutton, the blistering fat spitting off the circle of stones containing the blaze. When I told them in Hindi and sign language that I was a vegetarian, they laughed. I had made a great joke and I laughed too because not to eat meat was to undermine their existence.

Around the fire the men told stories, but the dialect was beyond me. I concentrated on their body language. Their hands moved with the drama. One man told of a tussle with a bear, holding up a three-fingered hand to prove his courage (and luck). Another related the dangers of crossing an engorged stream, one arm moving in a dryland breaststroke while the other held an imaginary lamb tight to his chest. A third man recalled the comedy of travelling to Delhi. He bellowed impersonations of the rickshaws’ horns and goose-stepped haughtily around the fire in imitation of the city folk’s arrogance.

Then there was silence, one of those regular conversational lulls, and they all gazed at me. It was my turn. So I launched into a tale, part English, part broken Hindi, part hand motions of how once I’d been surrounded by a pack of wolves in the Yukon Territory. I had been trapped by a dozen pairs of glinting wolf eyes on a geological seismic line, a three-metre-wide clearing slashed, straight as an arrow, for tens or even hundreds of kilometres through the sub-boreal forest. It was a story the shepherds could relate to and, although my yarn was in a mix of languages, I could see in the flickering light how their eyes tracked me. I slashed the air with my hands to make clear the futility of the predicament. I howled at the moon like the lead wolf and rustled loose sticks to underscore my retreat through the bush. I dropped to crouching, holding my hands wide to show how the wolves dissolved into the forest. With my escape the audience exhaled and then erupted in applause and laughter.

October 6

My friends sent me packing after breakfast with a few strong slaps on the back and half a dozen lentil-filled chapatis wrapped in greasy newsprint.

I walked hard but there was no defined trail. I connected meadows and scree slopes and was on the Hamta-la by noon. The breeze on the summit was dry and dusty. The pass is a watershed – to the north lay the desert valleys of the Tibetan Himalayas, to my back fell away the forests and meadows of the mountains’ subcontinental slope. Below me again was the Chandra River, a source stream of the Chenab, the main river of Kashmir, which itself joins the Indus in Pakistan and outlets in the Arabian Sea.

On the way down from the pass I was sure I’d lost my way. The path followed a fifteen-centimetre granite ledge above a sixteen-metre drop, a line better suited to goats than humans. I proceeded cautiously, moving with awareness, one foot in front of the other, gently, carefully, feeling my twenty-kilogram pack evenly balanced on the curve of my spine. I was fully aware of my own mortality because if I fell no one was there to pick me up; no one but the mountain goats would even know I had fallen. Each step was a meditation, a focused connection between my body and the stone. All else was peripheral. I thought of Michel in Skardu, climbing to be with God, moving closer to the infinite and of my own brushes with the divine in motion.

When I had been a ski racer I had on a few occasions, in great races, functioned in what athletes call the zone; any analysis of my body, my competitors, the snow, my skis, the people cheering along the trail – all that disappeared. I became part of the movement: body, mind, skis and snow all moving together. It was symbiosis. In those times, even though I was pushing myself to the limit, there was no pain. Pain has no place when you are moving perfectly. Those moments were flawless because they were without time in a sport that classifies itself by the clock. I know now that one of the reasons I enjoy walking so much is because when I’m moving on my own two feet for hour after hour, day after day, time itself loses its significance.

Years after the trek, while editing this book, I wondered whether Gareth had had such an epiphany the night of the accident. A moment or moments when all the rowers moved in unison, blades clipping into and out of the ruffled water. The shell moving, accelerating under the combined effort of eight men’s muscle. The V wake of the boat spreading out behind the team. Faster and faster, moving against the inevitable. I hope he had that, a glimpse of infinity before the void.

I camped on scree by the Chandra River. The water ran clear and fast over great broken slabs of granite. Green moss, thylacospermum caespitosum and woolly-haired, yellow-flowered tanacetum eked an existence from between marble-veined and mica-chipped boulders. On the bank I felt the knock of stones tossed by the current, the tremors carried through earth and water. The sun set and the moon climbed around the Pir Panjal range. It lit the valley in ashen light and stirred its namesake river; chandra in Hindi means moon.

I made dinner and revelled in its simplicity. My life had been pared to essentials. I drew water, cooked rice. I looked at the stars. There was contentment in doing one thing at a time. It was a life of perpetual meditation.

In a more formal sense I had learned to meditate in a Thai Buddhist monastery five years before with a charismatically humble septuagenarian monk named Buddhadasa Bhikku. The first time meditation had affected me I was ten days into a two-week silent retreat, forty minutes into the sitting and I felt my mind separating from my body. I was scared. I found myself looking down at my cross-legged corpse, thinking, “Shit, how do I get back in there?” I wanted out of the meditation, but not while my being was disconnected. Then, for no other reason than that I wanted it, my spirit dropped back into the lotus-positioned body. No noise, no fanfare, just movement – up and down – an elevator of consciousness. I realized, for the first time in my life, how I had authority over my scattered thoughts.

But the meditation I found on the Himalayan trail was different. It was a steady contentment, a knowledge that I was in the right place at the right time. I was walking when I should walk and sleeping when I should sleep. Beyond that I needed nothing.